Mobydisc said..dusta said..
quite simply the farmers should band together and sell their milk to china if they are unhappy with the prices they are getting . I have just spent two weeks in shenyang which is northern china by the Nth Koren border and a 1kg bag of devondale full cream milk powder was selling for $35 AUD . Yup $35 AUD .
Agree, there is a big demand for milk overseas. I used to live in Hong Kong and milk was around four times more expensive there than it was in Australia at the time.
MG and Fonterra already supply to China.
They way over-cooked the forecast to what the Chinese market would take and called in extra from their company owned farms, the ones you see on tv complaining about how hard done by they are.
Add that to a global fall in commodity milk price and you get the situation these farmers are now in.
MG retrospectively paid them as per the contracts they signed, hence the massive drop in farm gate price.
They had to drop the price, they have a legal responsibility to make money for their shareholders, however being a co-op the farmers themselves are the shareholders. Go figure.
No government milk levy should ever be put in place, you didnt hear the farmers crying poor 2 years ago when the commodity price was through the roof and they all went out and bought brand new John Deers.
And it sets a massive precedence to any Aussie export industry that is subject to global commodity price fluctuations.